Remember how we talked about how waves seem to propagate extremely slowly into that calm patch that occurs when a boat pulls away from a dock? Well, the other day I noticed that there is even more physics you can see when watching a similar situation: You see how long waves propagate much faster than short waves (that is for deep water waves, in shallow water the wave speed only depends on water depth, not on wave length)

Here you see a formerly smooth patch of water where the Håkon Mosby was until a minute ago, and you see how long waves have already propagated into that smooth patch while shorter waves are everywhere in the choppy water around the smooth patch, but have yet to propagate into it. Now that I think of it I’ve seen this many times before, I just never noticed. It’s even visible in the video I posted with the other blog post.

And here is a video. Note how the long waves invade the smooth spot of water long before the shorter waves do: